Worn Down (2020)

“Worn Down” is a collection of 10 items of hand-sewn clothing made from canvas cloth and painted with acrylic. The collection explores the relationship between the “real world,” which encompasses our physical body and is represented through the clothes, and the “abstract world,” which encompasses social constructs, feelings, dreams, and memory and is portrayed through the abstract figures that have been painted. The paintings on the clothes raise the question of whether the physical and the abstract can really be separated. For example, the painting of the blue girl in hanbok, a traditional Korean wear, with a braid on the modern mini skirt, represents the presence of memory and history in how we “wear” our reality. The bridge between the real world and the abstract one is “worn down.”